Breaking News

Opinion

Remain Connected To The Truth

Local Commentaries

Do your eyes lie or is it your mind struggling to erase what your eyes have seen? If you never saw the videos of Renee Good and Alex Pretti’s deaths, you could just accept the news that they were provocateurs and deserved to be shot. You could choose to believe what you hear. The operative word here is choose, but your mind can’t erase what your eyes saw, you don’t have a choice to unsee what you saw! That is a hard mental disconnect! Our pledge of allegiance says, “we believe in one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” Justice begins with us ...

Resurrecting the Dunkirk Power Plant

Local Commentaries

Our State Senator, county officials and others have advocated that the old NRG power plant in Dunkirk be reopened as a natural gas/electric plant. It is a proposal that should be considered. I can still remember the day when then Governor Andrew Cuomo went to Dunkirk and promised a big crowd that the plant would be converted from coal to natural gas...a plan that never got off the ground. What you see now, still looming over the Dunkirk harbor, is the shell of the former coal/electric plant. It is doubtful that a natural gas plant would need be housed in such a big structure...but ...

Affordability Always Makes Sense

Local Commentaries

Last weekend’s papers had the County Legislature’s Republican majority leader, Jamie Gustafson, critical of the three provisions of the “Affordability Act of 2026” introduced at the January County Legislature meeting by me as the assistant minority leader and Bob Banksoski, the minority leader. Our legislation would first make more senior citizen homeowners eligible for a partial property tax exemption, second, reduce the County’s property tax by $2,000,000 for 2027 and, third, support a County sales tax reduction from 8% to 7 3/4%, with more of the sales tax revenue going to ...

The History Of Valentine’s Day

Local Commentaries

Today marks another day to celebrate Love, and the feelings we have toward special people in our lives, be it True Love, Puppy Love, Love and Marriage, Crush Love, and/or any other type of feeling that makes us all “googlie ooglie” inside for that someone special. In what has become a holiday which started out as a romantic dinner celebration, has been embellished through time to include, flowers, candy, flowers and candy, a bracelet, a necklace, and bracelet and necklace, a ring, a bracelet and a ring, a necklace and a ring, a necklace, a bracelet, and a ring, a puppy, and if ...

NY’s New Stance On Life

Local Commentaries

By Margot Russell This is not an argument against mercy. It is an argument against pretending that power always uses mercy carefully. There is a particular kind of dishonesty that shows up whenever assisted death is proposed by people in power. We are told this choice will remain humane, and rare. We are told to stop worrying about abuse because, by God, the government respects life. But the moment the state authorizes death as a remedy, the argument is no longer about mercy. It becomes about eligibility. And eligibility, once introduced, never stays the same. I call it the big ...